Dirt

Alice in Chains, on Columbia Records

Without doubt, you've heard a sickening amount about the newest music craze in America, grunge metal. Unless, of course, you're one of the invisible legions of pre-sell-out alternative fiends who slept and ate the likes of Metallica, Nirvana, Soundgarden, L7, Smashing Pumpkins and Jane's Addiction before those annoying bandwagoneers jumped on and spoiled the secret--you still love your bands, but you hate the tag-alongs.

There is, thank goodness, one germ from this burgeoning music scene that neither die-hards nor preppies have tarnished: Alice in Chains. Their name implies unmarketable brashness, and the Chains made that implication a reality on their first album, Facelift, and have reincarnated this same as yet unrecognized talent for their second outing, Dirt.

Alice in Chains, despite sales that keep them far away from the Billboard best-seller charts, have created a sound that far surpasses the money-weakened punch of Metallica and the given-life-to-by-preppies ditties of Nirvana.

The Chains' bass-driven sound grinds slow on Dirt, but Layne Staley (vocals, guitar) and Jerry Cantrell's backup's blend together to give the songs a more melodic flow than the typical drowned-out harmonies from the likes of Chris Cornell and Soundgarden.

"Them Bones," the album's first cut, digs up Dirt with shrilling howls. The vocals proceed to ride a rush of music faster than what listeners may be familiar with from the first album. Primary song-writer Cantrell has transformed the band's signature half-tempo thumping into a faster and more experimental growl. Note the patched-together, but still singularly powerful, feel of "Sickman," the 5th track on the record.

True, many people have been duped into the belief that Alice in Chains is a band about flower children and peace, given the group's name and song titles and whatnot. A quick glance at the lyric sheet, however, should dispel such misinformed notions. Cantrell's style doesn't just dabble with abstracted misery; it takes us to higher planes of confusion about the vulgarities of life. Try these crowd-pleasing verses out at your next party: "I have never felt such frustration/ Or lack of self control/ I want you to kill me/ And dig me under, I want to live no more."

Despite the rather morbid topics, the music has an almost life-like flexibility to it. Like magic, Alice in Chains knows when the attention of ordinary mortals tends to wane; that's when they fire off a jagged riff, or slow down so that Staley's guitar can emerge from a mess of noise and cry out a few soul-twisting notes.

You have the wrong impression if you think head-slinging hip-pushers from the grunge scene have little intelligence, or at the very most a carnal life-goal, but here again the players would show us otherwise. In fact, the entire theme of Dirt is so well connected that the all the tracks on the album are about just that!

Well, the real theme is not so much the ecological qualities of the brown crumbly stuff as the internment value of it. For example "Rain When I Die," "Down in a Hole" and "Them Bones" all express the rather somber motif elicited by the Chain crew.

Alice in Chains' last wish would be to have their listeners believe that they do have any agenda more intellectualized than making the blood swish back and forth in your head as your body conforms to the primal throb of their beat. Maybe that's why the instrumental content of their songs is so good.